From Swamp to Wetland: The Creation of Everglades National Park

By Chris Wilhelm

This book chronicles the creation of Everglades National Park, the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States. This effort, which spanned 1928 to 1958, was of central importance to the later emergence of modern environmentalism. Prior to the park’s creation, the Everglades was seen as a reviled and useless swamp, unfit for typical recreational or development projects. The region’s unusual makeup also made it an unlikely candidate to become a national park, as it had none of the sweeping scenic vistas or geological monuments found in other nationally protected areas.

Park advocates drew on new ideas concerning the value of biota and ecology, the importance of wilderness, and the need to protect habitats, marine ecosystems, and plant life to redefine the Everglades. Using these ideas, the Everglades began to be recognized as an ecologically valuable and fragile wetland—and thus a region in need of protective status.

While these new ideas foreshadowed the later emergence of modern environmentalism, tourism and the economic desires of Florida’s business and political elites also impacted the park’s future. These groups saw the Everglades’ unique biology and ecology as a foundation on which to build a tourism empire. They connected the Everglades to Florida’s modernization and commercialization, hoping the park would help facilitate the state’s transformation into the Sunshine State. Political conservatives welcomed federal power into Florida so long as it brought economic growth.

Yet, even after the park’s creation, conservative landowners successfully fought to limit the park and saw it as a threat to their own economic freedoms. Today, a series of levees on the park’s eastern border marks the line between urban and protected areas, but development into these areas threatens the park system. Rising sea levels caused by global warming are another threat to the future of the park. The battle to save the swamp’s biodiversity continues, and Everglades Park stands at the center of ongoing restoration efforts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780820362403

Chris Wilhelm

CHRIS WILHELM is associate professor of history at the College of Coastal Georgia. His research has appeared in the Journal of Southern History and the Florida Historical Quarterly. He lives in Brunswick, Georgia.

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From Swamp to Wetland

SERIES EDITORS

James C. Giesen, Mississippi State University

Erin Stewart Mauldin, University of South Florida

ADVISORY BOARD

Judith Carney, University of California–Los Angeles

S. Max Edelson, University of Virginia

Robbie Ethridge, University of Mississippi

Ari Kelman, University of California–Davis

Shepard Krech III, Brown University

Megan Kate Nelson, www.historista.com

Tim Silver, Appalachian State University

Mart Stewart, Western Washington University

Paul S. Sutter, founding editor, University of Colorado Boulder

From Swamp to Wetland

THE CREATION OF EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK

Chris Wilhelm

The University of Georgia Press

Athens

© 2022 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

All rights reserved

Set in 10.5/13.5 Garamond Premier Pro by Kaelin Chappell Broaddus

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Printed digitally

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wilhelm, Chris, 1978– author.

Title: From swamp to wetland : the creation of Everglades National Park / Chris Wilhelm.

Other titles: Creation of Everglades National Park | Environmental history and the American South.

Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press, [2022] | Series: Environmental history and the American South | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021059117 | ISBN 9780820362380 (hardback) | ISBN 9780820362397 (paperback) | ISBN 9780820362403 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: National parks and reserves—Florida—History—20th century. | Environmentalism—Florida—History—20th century. | Tourism—Florida—History—20th century. | Real estate development—Florida—History—20th century. | Everglades National Park (Fla.)—History—20th century. | Everglades (Fla.)—History—20th century. | Everglades (Fla.)—Environmental conditions.

Classification: LCC F317.E9 W48 2022 | DDC 975.9/39—dc23/eng/20211214

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059117

For Mom and Dad

CONTENTS

Foreword, by Erin Stewart Mauldin and James C. Giesen

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1. The Everglades and a New England Nurseryman

CHAPTER 2. Redefining National Parks, Redefining the Everglades

CHAPTER 3. Promoting the Park

CHAPTER 4. Authorizing a Wilderness Park

CHAPTER 5. The ENPC and the New Deal in Florida

CHAPTER 6. The Creation of Everglades National Park

CHAPTER 7. Finalizing the Park’s Boundaries

EPILOGUE. Managing the Everglades

CONCLUSION

Notes

Bibliography

Index

FOREWORD

A decade before the creation of Everglades National Park in 1947, the U.S. Department of the Interior produced a short film on the area of South Florida earmarked for preservation. The production does little to promote the Everglades as a destination for tourists. The camera pans across cabbage palms drooping over slivers of sand and impenetrable banks of mangroves. Water stretches toward a horizon marred by black clouds; long-necked waterfowl pick through stagnant pools and marshy grass. Seven minutes of soundless, flickering black-and-white footage captures no soaring vista, no Edenic oasis—nothing that could be described as awe inspiring or even charming. Twenty years later, a slickly produced pamphlet advertising the south Florida experience ran into a similar problem. Despite leaning heavily on stereotypes of Florida as an exotic paradise, the booklet struggled to characterize the appeal of Everglades National Park for tourists. There is no single point of dramatic focus in the Everglades National Park, the writer admits, no bold prospect suitable for a postcard. No other national park demands more perception and patience of the visitor, for the beauty of the Everglades is not immediately obvious. It is a mysterious and ageless landscape that requires an appreciation of nature’s subtleties.¹

As federal agencies’ attempts at boosterism in the 1930s and 1950s demonstrate, the Everglades National Park fits poorly alongside the purple mountains’ majesty of Yosemite and Yellowstone. It was a place carved from neither water nor land but somewhere in between, a place devoid of obvious economic or aesthetic value. Why protect it? From Swamp to Wetland argues that changing views of what nature meant in the twentieth century and the growing influence of ecology on the post–Progressive Era National Park Service motivated the creation of Everglades National Park. Advocates made it clear that preserving the Everglades from development safeguarded unique flora and fauna and the ecosystems that supported them. At the same time, supporters hoped that the space, its wildlife, and its landscape—whether or not it was suitable for a postcard—could be a potential source of profit through tourism. Like the Everglades themselves, the park’s origin is a story full of contradictions and, as Chris Wilhelm argues, a story essential to understanding the history of nature in the American imagination.

Placing the Everglades at the center of debates over the value of wilderness, nature protection, and ecology in the twentieth century challenges environmental historians’ habit of looking to the West, rather than the South, for those developments. Although most places in the United States could never claim a truly wilderness past, the idea of the wild western frontier has long permeated much of the environmental history of conservation and preservation. In the South, one can rarely take the humans out of nature, thanks to the region’s long connection to large-scale agriculture and millennia of human settlement. It takes a certain audacity to imagine a national park in such a place. Thus, southern environmental history lacks the dynamic scholarship on national parks that the American West possesses. From Swamp to Wetland, then, not only reorients the scholarly conversation about nature protection toward the South and away from the West but also gives much-needed attention to national parks in a region that cannot hide the continuous presence of humans.

From Swamp to Wetland resurrects the stories and actions of the men and women who both spearheaded and opposed the park’s creation, introducing Floridian counterparts to the Muirs and Pinchots of other conservation narratives. Although once the site of vibrant indigenous communities, the Everglades encountered by Europeans was a landscape drained of its people. It was a derelict swamp, an unwanted expanse of land deemed suitable only for the Seminole refugees fleeing American expansionism in the nineteenth century. Later Floridians hoped to drain the Everglades of water, dreaming of an agricultural paradise, and when that failed, to use oil drilling as a shortcut to prosperity in Florida’s wild interior. Only in the early twentieth century, thanks to the efforts of the devoted Yankee transplant Ernest Coe, did protecting—rather than eradicating—the Everglades become a viable outcome. Creating a national park took decades, however, and faced both local and federal hostility. Landowners, politicians, and even some Park Service employees pushed back against an Everglades National Park, and Wilhelm argues that their opposition foreshadowed modern conservatism’s aversion to environmental regulation.

This book does not, however, have a happy ending. Although advocates succeeded in creating a national park in the Everglades by drawing attention to its wildlife and complex hydraulic systems, only a fraction of the Everglades is protected from agriculture and other development. Even within park boundaries, wildlife has declined precipitously; past and present drainage initiatives—and other water conservation efforts—further threaten the area’s ecosystems. As Wilhelm shows, the very ecological dependencies that the Park Service sought to preserve has made the area more vulnerable to change, for Everglades ecosystems cannot be preserved as the landscape outside its boundaries diminishes. With this book as our guide, we are in a better place to understand whether Everglades National Park continues to protect a wilderness or creates a new one.

Erin Stewart Mauldin and James C. Giesen

Series Editors

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Researching, writing, editing, and publishing this book has been a long journey and I’ve accrued many debts along the way, far more than I can address in this space. This book began as a dissertation at Florida State University that I completed in 2010. I started at FSU in 2003 under the mentorship of Elna Green, an incredible scholar, teacher, and advisor. Elna took a chance on me as a first-year graduate student and shaped me as an historian, writer, and thinker. I hope this book meets her high bar for historiographical relevancy and clear writing. Fritz Davis graciously agreed to oversee the dissertation to its completion in 2010 and helped orient me in the field of environmental history. I also owe Darden Pyron a debt of thanks. Darden was the most important professor I had as an undergraduate at Florida International University, and he played an enormous role in my own intellectual awakening. An inspiring lecturer, he took an interest in developing the critical thinking and writing skills of students.

The editors at the UGA Press, Mick Gusinde-Duffy, Erin Mauldin, and James Giesen, also were enormously helpful and patient with me throughout the review process. Erin Maudlin especially put an incredible amount of time into reading early manuscript versions, making wonderful suggestions that strengthened the structure and flow of this book. I owe her an enormous debt, and I truly appreciate her sacrifice of time and effort. I was lucky to have Deborah Oliver copyedit this manuscript. Her focus on detail and consistency improved this book greatly.

My research took me to numerous archives and libraries over the years. Some of these were so long ago that I’ve forgotten the names of the people who aided that early research. I made repeated trips to two archives in particular, and I came to know several archivists well. I spent countless hours at the State Archives of Florida in Tallahassee, both as a graduate research assistant and as an historian working on my own projects. Thanks to Mariam, Boyd Murphree, Dave Nelson, Hendry Miller, and Josh Youngblood. I also spent significant time at the P. K. Younge Library of Florida History at the University of Florida. As a graduate student, I greatly benefitted from the Cecilia L. Johnson Grant for Visiting Graduate Scholars, and I am indebted to Jim Cusick for his continued support and interest in my work.

My friends and family have provided moral, financial, and intellectual support over the years. My parents, Jim and Margann, to whom this book is dedicated, have always been supportive and understanding. This book has been a long time in the making, and I know they’re happy to see it in print. My wife, Althea, has likewise been a consistent supporter. As a marsh ecologist, she has also been a great sounding board for ideas, and a great intellectual partner. My oldest and best friends, Marton Cavani and Fabian Kahn, also deserve thanks, and they helped this project along in various ways. In the twenty years I’ve known them, they’ve helped shape me as a person, as an intellectual, and as a writer. Another old friend to whom I owe thanks is Cindy Ermus, who in a crazy twist of fate also earned a PhD from Florida State. I don’t think we ever thought we’d both follow similar paths—but here we are. My colleagues in the Department of Social Sciences at the College of Coastal Georgia offered tremendous moral support and comradery as well since 2012.

I also need to thank all the students I’ve had over the years. Their desire for education is what pays my bills. I’ve had many, many terrific students over the years, and many have been interested in my own research and ideas. It has been a privilege to teach so many students over the years. I hope to continue to grow as a teacher and researcher as I carry on this interesting adventure in academia. Finally, there are countless other people throughout the years—teachers, colleagues, family, friends, baristas, bartenders, and fellow students—who have supported and shaped me throughout the years as well. We all live in a tangled ecosystem of people, and no one creates anything by themselves—thanks to everyone who has crossed my path over the years.

From Swamp to Wetland

INTRODUCTION

On December 6, 1947, Harry Truman took a break from a working vacation at the Little White House in Key West to dedicate Everglades National Park (ENP). The park had been created on June 20, 1947, but park supporters wisely delayed holding the dedication ceremony until the winter, when the Everglades was cool and dry. The ceremony took place on the west coast of Florida in Everglades City, a small town that residents hoped would become a center of park tourism. Park supporters and local residents treated Truman to a Florida experience. He received gifts from Seminoles and Greek immigrant sponge fishers, toured the local Rod and Gun Club, and ate a lunch that showcased Florida foods like stone crabs, Key lime pie, and a dish called Okalaocooche cup, consisting of crushed fruit inside a halved coconut.¹

After lunch, Truman delivered the keynote address at the park’s dedication ceremony. His speech reflected the nation’s confused and changing ideas about nature and placed the park in the context of these transitions. Truman’s speech harked back to older ideas about the spiritual values of nature, the economic value of tourism, and the conservation of natural resources. Yet he also referenced new ideas concerning the inherent worth of species, the value of wilderness, and the science of ecology.

Truman explained that in the Everglades there were no lofty peaks seeking the sky, no mighty glaciers or rushing streams wearing away the uplifted land. Here is land, tranquil in its quiet beauty, serving not as the source of water, but as the last receiver of it. While previous parks had protected the geological monuments of the West, this park would instead protect a flat wetland at the southern tip of Florida and the area’s spectacular plant and animal life. Truman outlined the park’s biological rationales and noted that if not for the park, hundreds of kinds of wildlife . . . might otherwise be extinct. Aside from these stirring sentiments, Truman centered most of his speech on the wise use of our natural resources and the need for more efficient mining, forestry, and farming practices.²

Truman celebrated the park as a wilderness area but also promoted park tourism. The ENP was an irreplaceable primitive area that puzzlingly would soon be visited by millions of tourists. Rather than simply being a nature preserve, its great value lay in the enrichment of the human spirit. These tourists would also enrich the economy of Florida, an important factor to the state’s business and political communities. Finally, Truman connected the park to the Everglades’ water supply. Foreshadowing efforts to restore the area’s historic flow of water, he noted that we need to prevent [the] further dropping of the water table in the Everglades. At the same time, though, he celebrated human efforts to control water and lamented the failure to build hydroelectric dams.³

Truman’s speech, like the park it celebrated, was contradictory. These contradictions reflected the nation’s changing attitudes toward nature in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. In the interwar and postwar periods, Americans questioned their relationships with nature: Was nature something humans could control, or were we just another species, albeit a very powerful one, acting within ecosystems? Did nature exist for our spiritual and economic benefit, or did it have inherent value and worth? Should we seek to control nature or protect it for its own sake? For most of its history, the United States embraced an anthropocentric view of nature: humans controlled a pliant environment, which only had worth in the context of human value systems. These ideas were challenged in the interwar period by new ecological ideas that decentered humans from the environment and by a rising sense of biocentrism that posited all life forms had inherent worth.⁴

This book examines the creation of Everglades National Park, a campaign that reflected these transitions in American environmental thought. The park’s creation drew on new biocentric and ecological ideas but was also grounded in older, anthropocentric ideas about the preservation of nature’s beauty and the conservation of natural resources. Park advocates, National Park Service (NPS) officials, and Florida politicians embraced these new ecological ideas to varying degrees. Park advocates advanced new ecological and biocentric rationales for preservation, yet also touted the park’s economic and inspirational values. NPS officials celebrated this park as the best expression of new conservation ideas concerning wilderness and biological preservation. Yet the service had long prioritized preserving nature’s beauty for tourists and sought to open the Everglades to tourism. Florida politicians, eager to grow the state’s economy during the Great Depression and after World War II, supported the park as an economic venture. Yet they understood that Florida tourism was dependent on the environment. They saw the Everglades’ biology as a foundation on which to build a tourism empire. Additionally, they saw the park, and its biological focus, as part of a larger effort to transform the state’s identity. This park would help Florida position itself as a modern Sunbelt state at the forefront of the nation’s cultural and scientific trends.

The Everglades itself was fertile ground for these new ecological and biocentric ideas. Park supporters found that their traditional conceptions of nature and preservation were inapplicable in these wetlands. Just as the park’s creation was a transitional campaign, wetlands are transitional landscapes. Wetlands challenged America’s basic ideas about nature. To Americans, both in the past and present, nature means temperate forests, grasslands, hills, and mountains. Nature is the seasons, oscillating between the poles of winter and summer. Nature is terra firma, the solid earth, the dry land. The Everglades is none of these things. It is a subtropical wetland, composed of vast freshwater marshes, mangrove swamps, coastal estuaries, and bays. It is always summer in the Everglades—the seasons are wet and dry, not cold and hot. Most important, the Everglades is not land, nor is it water—it is both land and water. It is marsh and swamp. It is bays, estuaries, tidal creeks, and sloughs. The region’s ambiguous wetness, just as much as human action, shaped the region’s history and this park’s creation. Park supporters faced with the Everglades’ wetness had to rethink their ideas about tourism, wilderness, national parks, and nature itself. The unique nature of the Glades influenced the course of this history. Although this is a book about the politics of the ENP’s creation, the Everglades itself is also the subject of this work and an actor in this story.

Much has been written about the Everglades, which has become a much-loved landscape, particularly by Floridians (who mostly express this love from a distance). Yet little attention has been paid to Everglades National Park itself; the park’s creation has been overshadowed by other aspects of the Everglades’ history, like drainage, flood control, and Everglades restoration. Understanding the park, though, is essential. Its creation was a key moment in the emergence of modern environmentalism and marked the beginning of Florida’s efforts to protect its environment. The park continues to be central to flood control and restoration efforts in the Everglades today and serves as a larger symbol of the nation’s relationship with nature.⁵

The fight for the ENP was an important event in the history of U.S. environmental politics, the environmental history of the American South, and the history of the national parks. The nation’s national parks are central elements of its environmental regulatory state; the creation of these parks was likewise central to America’s broader efforts to protect its natural environment.⁶ Many studies of the U.S. national parks have paid close attention to the parks as cultural creations, as wilderness preserves, and as agents of Native American removal.⁷ This book looks at these themes in the ENP but also connects the park’s creation to the larger history of American environmental thought and environmental politics. This park was the central agent of the construction of Florida’s environmental regulatory state and was perhaps the strongest expression of a new environmental view of nature that first emerged in the 1930s before becoming widely adopted in the 1970s.

Additionally, this work expressly tells the story of a southern wetland. U.S. environmental historians, like past conservationists, have largely thought about nature in the context of temperate, terrestrial landscapes. Traditionally, forests, mountains, plains, and rivers have been more studied than wetlands, deserts, and oceans, although these trends have been challenged by recent works.⁸ Similarly, many environmental histories have been situated in the American West. Other regions, like the South, have received less attention, although over the last two decades, southern environmental history has grown tremendously.⁹ Given the region’s history, agricultural studies have appropriately dominated the field.¹⁰ More recently, scholars have published works that examine Appalachia’s environment, the South’s forests, and the South’s relationship with water.¹¹

Other topics central to environmental history, like environmental politics and the creation of the environmental regulatory state, have remained understudied in the South.¹² This is partly due to the South’s suppression of democracy and citizen activism and to its history of resisting federal power and the creation of strong regulatory structures. Yet, during the Great Depression and especially after World War II, tremendous change came to the South. Many southern states, including Florida, sought to protect landscapes and ecosystems. This work seeks to integrate the history of environmental politics and environmental state building into the history of the South’s environment. Just as it centers wetlands, it centers the politics of park making in the South. This political-environmental approach illustrates the important role of nature in the emergence of the modern South. The ENP was central to Florida’s efforts at modernization between the Great Depression and the late 1950s. Important economic sectors in post–World War II Florida, like tourism and retirement, directly relied on state power and on the protection of pristine environments like the Everglades. The ENP’s creation was part of a larger historical dynamic, wherein Florida re-created its identity, reshaped its economy, and both exploited and protected the state’s natural bounty and beauty.

The fight for the ENP began in 1928. At the start of their campaign, park advocates prioritized reimagining the Everglades. Today the Everglades is a cherished national treasure, a jewel in the National Park System, a symbol of Florida’s nature, and an ecosystem with ardent and passionate defenders. Yet before the 1930s it was a dreary, dank swamp—a poisonous, miasmatic wasteland. It was a decried and derelict landscape, ignored and vilified. By the late nineteenth century, only Seminoles lived there, driven by war into that watery region. For most of the state’s history, Floridians dreamed of draining the Everglades; their fervent desire was to destroy it and raise an agrarian paradise out of the muck.¹³ The Everglades was a swamp, and today it is a wetland.¹⁴ Ernest Coe, the park’s most important advocate, redefined the Everglades. He presented this region as an aquatic, tropical, and biological wonderland and tied the Everglades’ identity to its fantastic and unique flora and fauna. Coe’s rebranded Everglades was drawn from scientific views of the region and reflected new ecological ideas. Yet it also served a political purpose and was explicitly crafted to ensure the region measured up to prevailing national parks standards and to the expectations of national conservationists.

Park advocates next created new rationales for the Everglades’ preservation. Both this process and the region’s redefinition reflected larger changes in how Americans thought about nature. Those changing ideas can most clearly be seen through the dynamics of U.S. environmental politics. The park’s rationales straddled the divide between the conservation of the Progressive Era (1890–1920) and the modern environmentalism of the late twentieth century. Progressive conservation was divided into two camps. Utilitarian conservationists saw nature as a set of resources that needed to be used efficiently. They supported the sustainable use of trees, wildlife, and minerals to ensure a continued supply of natural resources. These ideas were enshrined in the U.S. Forest Service (USFS). Aesthetic preservationists saw nature through a spiritual and aesthetic lens and saw their ideas institutionalized in the NPS. Nature was beautiful, and that beauty uplifted and rejuvenated the human spirit. These scenic values were clearly seen in the western valleys, mountains, and canyons protected as national parks. Yet these two varieties of Progressive conservation overlapped considerably. Both reflected the desires and concerns of elites and both viewed nature in anthropocentric terms. Whether used efficiently or preserved, nature existed for humans to use.¹⁵

In contrast, modern environmentalism was informed by biological views of nature, was biocentric, and often relied on grassroots campaigns. Informed by the science of ecology, environmentalists saw species, including humans, in the context of ecosystems. These activists addressed new global concerns as well. Pollution was a major focus for environmentalists in the 1970s; the ozone layer, climate change, and ocean plastics have become major concerns since. Environmentalists often saw wilderness as central to preservation, and by the 1980s connected this concern for wilderness to the fate of species. Environmentalism focused on quality of life issues as well. As Americans experienced rising standards of living after World War II, they came to expect and demand clean water, clean air, a healthy environment, and natural beauty.¹⁶

The fight for the ENP was grounded in Progressive conservation but pointed the way forward to modern environmentalism. Park advocates built on and expanded the concerns of conservationists using ecological and biocentric ideas. For example, Florida preservationists had fought to save the region’s wading birds from destruction. These charismatic and beautiful species had obvious value to Progressive conservationists. ENP advocates expanded this impulse to include all species, including predators and reptiles. The park’s creation was one of the earliest efforts to protect marine species, and it was the strongest expression in U.S. history of a desire to protect nonwoody plants. Rather than just valuing nature for its beauty, park advocates believed all life had inherent value. Likewise, ENP advocates saw landscapes through an ecological lens. Progressive preservationists saw landscapes in terms of their aesthetic and spiritual values, while ENP advocates saw the Everglades as habitats. Instead of just protecting scenery, ENP advocates sought a park that would protect the habitats and ranges of the Everglades’ flora and fauna.

These ecological trends challenged the NPS traditions and policies; the ENP was at the forefront of broader changes within the park service. While most parks protected stunning mountains and valleys for the benefit of tourists, this wetland park would protect the Everglades’ biota and would mostly be preserved as wilderness. Before the 1930s, national parks protected the geology of the West. Lacking a long history and a shared cultural tradition, these western geological monuments in turn were symbols of the nation’s identity.¹⁷ These western monuments represented manifest destiny, a sense of rugged individualism, and American expansion. These jagged peaks and dramatic valleys also displayed God’s fearsome and magnificent power.¹⁸ As sublime symbols of American identity, they likewise signaled God’s approval for the new nation. National parks were not just nature preserves or tourist attractions but were cultural artifacts infused with political and cultural meaning. Yet, the Everglades lies only mere feet above sea level. It is eminently flat and has no dramatic geological formations or scenic vistas. Rather than holding geological interest, this park protects biology. The NPS history of geological monumentalism was supplanted in the Everglades by a sense of biological monumentalism. This park’s alligators and roseate spoonbills symbolized the nation’s embrace of science and biodiversity. While other national parks harkened to a mythic past, this one embraced a scientific future.

America’s geological parks were primarily tourist attractions. Two factors in the 1930s challenged the NPS’s focus on tourism; both found their furthest expression in the ENP. During the 1920s and 1930s, the NPS was on the receiving end of a barrage of criticism regarding the overcommercialization and overuse of America’s parks. Modern wilderness advocates, who in 1935 founded the Wilderness Society, criticized the NPS and influenced the ENP’s creation.¹⁹ These activists sought to protect the recreational and spiritual values of wilderness, quickly concluding that banning roads would be the surest way to protect wilderness. In the 1930s, a group of NPS wildlife biologists challenged the service’s focus on tourism from a different perspective.²⁰ Believing that tourism negatively impacted park wildlife, they advocated for new park policies to protect predators and other animals. They also drew attention to the inadequate boundaries in most parks and argued for park boundaries that conformed to the ranges of species.

In response to these criticisms, the NPS altered its policies regarding park wildlife and highlighted the wilderness values of existing national parks. It also sought new parks that centered both wilderness and biological preservation. The ENP was the strongest expression of these developments in the NPS. This park’s 1934 authorization was the first time wilderness was enshrined in federal law. This wilderness, though, was biocentric in purpose and would serve to further protect the Everglades’ biology.²¹ This park’s boundaries and future management policies were likewise shaped by biological priorities. Although after World War II the NPS resumed its focus on tourism at the expense of wilderness and biological preservation, the ENP continued to carry the torch for these causes. This park kept the flames of biological preservation and wilderness alive within the NPS until the modern environmentalism of the 1970s rekindled them. At the same time, it remained open to tourists who visited the region’s mysterious mangroves, uncanny orchids, exotic wading birds, and fearsome alligators.

These biological and ecological arguments enormously impacted the first phase of the park’s creation. From 1928 to 1937, Ernest Coe, a New England nursery owner who had recently moved to Miami, led the fight for the ENP. Coe was a zealous and uncompromising advocate and embodied the larger transitions in American environmental thought during the interwar period. He was a prophet, possessed with a rapturous love of the Everglades’ biota; he was also a shameless booster, hawking the prospects of park tourism to Florida’s business and political elites. His years in New England were marked by Progressive conservation, but in the Everglades he embraced many of the ideas that underpinned modern environmentalism. Coe was animated by a desire to protect the Everglades’ biota, but he spoke rapturously of the Everglades’ scenic and spiritual values. He promoted park tourism and the park’s economic benefits, but also celebrated the Everglades’ wilderness.

Coe publicized the park’s value to important national and local constituencies, created the intellectual justifications for the park’s creation, and oversaw the park’s authorization in 1934. After 1934, Coe failed to move the park forward, in part because he refused to compromise the park’s enormous boundaries, which he saw as central to the parks’ biocentric mission. Coe’s sense of ecological preservation found support within the New Deal and was influenced by the liberalism of the 1930s. Both the ENP and the New Deal represented an expansion of the environmental regulatory state and the power of the federal government. By 1937 the New Deal was waning in power; that year Coe also ceased to be an effective advocate.

The park project lay dormant after 1937 but was revived in 1941 by Florida governor Spessard Holland. Holland was a conservative southern Democrat who facilitated Florida’s economic growth and modernization during and after World War II.²² His support for the park, which encompasses the second phase of the park’s creation, was shaped by the moderate consensus politics of the post–World War II era, Holland’s own conservative views, and a pragmatic approach to politics. Holland espoused a Sunbelt environmentalism. He accepted Coe’s ideas about the need to protect the area’s biota from destruction, but he prioritized the park’s economic and anthropocentric values. Holland and his political allies sought the economic growth a tourism industry would bring to Florida, but they also understood that Florida tourism was dependent on a pristine and healthy environment. This Sunbelt environmentalism was not just a sense of environmentalism that emerged in the Sunbelt; rather this environmentalism would facilitate the Sunbelt’s emergence.

Many Sunbelt states in the South and West experienced rapid industrialization and urbanization during World War II.²³ This growth was federally subsidized, and after the war these Sunbelt states continued to draw on federal resources to further their economic modernization. Although most Sunbelt states sought growth in industrial, resource extraction, and high-tech industries, Florida sought to grow its service industries, especially its tourism sector.²⁴ To attract tourists, Florida needed to transform its identity. The state could no longer be seen as a backwater southern state, tainted by the legacies of secession, slavery, and racism. National parks had played a role in the creation of U.S. identity in the nineteenth century, and they would likewise help redefine Florida.²⁵ The ENP was a scientific park built on new environmental rationales. It protected biodiversity and signaled Florida’s embrace of modernity. This park, at the forefront of the nation’s environmental and scientific trends, signaled that Florida was now firmly at the center of America’s mainstream and ready to cater to the desires of tourists, snowbirds, and retirees. Florida would no longer be a backwater state in a backwater region. Instead it was transformed into the Sunshine State, the country’s premier tourist destination and retirement location.

Holland shepherded the park to its creation in 1947. This small nucleus of a park then expanded until its boundaries were formally set in 1958. The park represented an enormous growth of federal power in the state. Although Holland and other powerful Florida politicians were political conservatives who typically opposed federal intervention in economic and social affairs, the park’s creation was too good an economic deal to pass up.²⁶

Another group of political conservatives opposed the park after 1947. Landowners who were